Adopting Before Knowing: When Disruptive Technologies Require Investment Before Valuation

This paper examines investment decision-making processes in the context of disruptive technologies. While traditional decision-making frameworks assume that evaluation-relevant knowledge is readily available, this is not the case in the early stages of disruptive technologies. For disruptive technologies, the business case is not merely difficult to formulate but structurally unavailable at the point of decision. Based on data collected from senior executives across industries, this paper examines investment in disruptive technologies. Across categories including autonomous vehicles, solid-state batteries, blockchain, commercial drones, and generative AI, executives in our study note that the knowledge required to construct an investment case emerges primarily through the act of investing itself. In such cases, investment itself becomes a mechanism for generating evaluative knowledge, creating a recursive relationship between commitment and understanding.